That’s the theory now, but 2 months ago that wasn’t the theory.
It’s just that what is confusing everybody (including me)
I’m willing to believe the science behind it, but I haven’t seen the science yet (not sure I would even understand )
I know most pro’s train to exhaustion as well (but not all sessions)
It would just be nice to have a nice and full explanation (in an blog post maybe) so it’s clear for us mere mortals that this change is more effective and not just a change to keep the couchlandrians using Sufferfest (sorry: Systm)
They really don’t, even with your caveat.
“Occasionally” might make that a viable sentence. Plus, it’s easier for someone whose full-time occupation is sport to both understand where “exhaustion” but not exhausted is and also to adequately recover.
When they hit the point of exhaustion they can then do the good part of nothing for the rest of the day, if the average person hit the same level of tiredness in a morning session and then still has to put in a full day of work they are obliterating themselves.
I’ve done a lot of sports in my time, to reasonable standards and one of the things people do wrong the most is try to behave like they think Pros do.
We should definitely be looking to professionals to see what works and the general approach to take, but you absolutely must then tailor it to the reality of your circumstance. If an endurance athlete does 6 hours of training and then has the rest of that day and two following it off, you can’t do the same intensity for 6 hours and then work a full time job in the rest of that period effectively.
I think this was exactly the point @Coach.Neal.H was making by demonstrating the training of Rohan Dennis and Steve Worley.
Also to quote from The Way Out
The difference
in fitness gains between 30 minutes at 90% of
threshold and at 102% of threshold is minimal.
Still, the stress on your body from the latter is
much greater, and the recovery much longer.
I know it seems strange that doing less is better, but sports science advances, and more isn’t always better, more is just more. My profession isn’t in sports science, but listening to the podcasts I really buy into the idea of what SYSTM (and The Suf before it) is trying to do.
See Sir Neal’s response above. They computed W on each workout and made incremental changes. The science didn’t change two months ago - it just had not been implemented on some of the legacy Sufferfest workouts.
Also they needed to collect a body of data in order to do that analysis and tweaking. To me, the fact that they managed to produce sessions like 9H that could kill you with 30seconds to go, on cue, without that wealth of data, is pretty impressive. Scientists eh?
One thing that I don’t think has maybe been said quite explicitly is that sufferfest/wahoo appear to be concentrating on the training plan approach to fitness development. They have put a lot of effort in to developing the plans and how the workouts fit in to these. This was not always the case, as many (at least, as I imagine, I wasn’t part of it, though I did do several back in the day before things like apps came along) were standalone workouts. If you’re cascading things in to a plan then the use can changes a little, you need to be more wary of not entirely blowing up.
I wholeheartedly agree with this approach and I believe I am already seeing the reweards from this, with blocks which previously probably would have sent me over the edge.
Now, not everyone sticks to plans. And if you don’t mind entirely blowing up then turn it to 11 and knock yourself out. I will continue to turn it up as my plans progress and I approach a new test week. You can’t please everyone all of the time and you can’t have deterministic workotus that are perfectly suited to every use case all of the time. But systm has become a system and they’re integrating more recent knowledge, plus a very unique dataset, to this end.
I’m not saying they’re wrong, I’m just wondering why it wasn’t done before if it’s something they knew a long time already.
From my own experience: I have failed some sessions before (9 hammers for sure) and had to lie down afterwards, however, the day after I always felt more then OK (not OK enough to do 9 hammers again )
But I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt (they know more about training them me, for sure) and will reevaluate after the winter, after doing a full winter of training like last year; which gave me a serious performance increase, never had a full year with this high level of performance, ever. (and that at 42 years old)
I’m still amazed that people seem to think they know better than folks who train Olympians for a living and use the latest evidence based outputs.
As I posted on Facebook, it’s amazing: I have been with Suff for several years now and year on year have improved fitness despite being in my (cough) 50s. In the last 18-24 months the plans have been quite different from the earlier plans in that they have more science behind them. In that time I have gone from plateauing at around 19mph to holding 21+ in group rides - despite lower intensities.
Same was true with my marathon plans - 2-3 day of HIIT and the remainder being endurance/recovery. And funnily enough, exactly the same outcome: I got faster and had no injuries and was not constantly fatigued.
Nine hammers last night. I again failed as soon as the final one minute interval began. I completed Half Monty last week and reduced those results by 3% for Nine Hammers. The suffering remains.
And it’s actually more than half, because there is also a warmup and a cooldown. Come to think of it, FF is easy too. It’s an hour long and only has 26 minutes and 14 seconds of suffering. More than half of it is below threshold!
According to my notes, Half is Easy only spends about 35% of the time in the higher power zones. Two thirds is Easy does not sound the same. I calculate about 44% of FF is above threshold. Should it now be called Half Frontal?
As the old saying goes, you can drown in a river whose average depth is 4 feet.
Yes, Rohan typically trains closer to 20 hours/week, but Steve has averaged just under 9 hours/week since January 1, 2021…and throughout his working career and racing was 6-10 hours/week most weeks.
Rather than just considering the sum % of training that is easy/moderate/hard it’s important to consider how many days/week have high intensity training. For sure, someone with a lower total training volume can do a little bit higher % of their training at higher intensity, it’s not free license to do high intensity workouts every single session.
I’m curious about the over-under section on Angels. If the idea is to cross threshold with each over and under, doesn’t reducing the power targets subvert the intent of this segment?
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“easy” is a relative term innit? Think, Half Is Easy 
